“Look,” I said, “maybe the news hasn’t filtered down to the hinterlands, where Quantico typically parks its underachievers: J. Edgar Hoover’s dead. They buried him in a pleated skirt. So why don’t you knock off the old school, cooperation-through-intimidation G-man routine. Because right now, truthfully, I could give a rip about your ‘proper notice and authorization.’ ”
“I understand she’s your former wife,” Pellegrini said, “the party who’s missing?”
“We’re divorced. We were getting remarried.”
“I’m told she comes from money.”
“Meaning what? That I had some kind of financial motive to do her harm?”
Pellegrini looked at me evenly and said nothing, a standard interrogation tactic: wait for the interviewee to compulsively fill the silence with some inadvertent revelation.
“If I were going to hurt her,” I said, “wouldn’t logic dictate that I wait until the ink dried on our marriage certificate? California’s a community property state. That way, I could legally claim half her assets, no?”
“I don’t know,” Pellegrini said, “you tell me.”
“I just did.”
“How did you come to acquire the uranium, Mr. Logan?”
I’d had enough of the guy and his pointless questions. I stood, ‘accidentally’ brushing his tape recorder on the floor. The back cover fell off and two batteries flew out like victims ejected from a car crash.
“I’m not the bad guy here, Agent Pellegrini. Either read me my rights and hook me up, or this conversation’s over.”
He stooped to gather the pieces of his recorder and glared at me.
“I’m just doing my job, Mr. Logan.”
“If you were doing your job, Agent Pellegrini, you’d go find her.”
I refueled and flew back to South Lake Tahoe that afternoon to assist Streeter in the search for Savannah. Gordon Priest, the manager at Summit Aviation Services, was gone for the day. Marlene, Priest’s receptionist, welcomed my return with a heartfelt hug and fresh oatmeal cookies. They were all out of four-wheel-drive vehicles, she said, but I probably wouldn’t be needing one; there was no snow in the extended forecast. She rented me a white Ford Focus at 60 percent off the normal daily rate because, she said, she felt bad for me. The car had an infant seat in the back. I put it in the trunk.
Savannah’s disappearance made the local paper that morning, along with a hangdog photo of me holding up my photo of her. Every network affiliate in nearby Reno picked up the story. No mention was made of the stolen uranium. The FBI decided that the information was a matter of national security and squelched any public disclosure about it. When reporters in Santa Maria asked what the hubbub had been about at the airport, they were told that a multiagency training exercise had taken place there. Hotel employees and other civilian witnesses were made to sign nondisclosure agreements and threatened with arrest if they talked.
“Have You Seen This Woman?” notices and pictures of Savannah went up in store windows and on telephone poles throughout the Lake Tahoe area. Platoons of volunteers scoured the surrounding forests, while I knocked on doors and law enforcement personnel interviewed dozens of prospective witnesses. But after putting in twenty-hour days for more than a week, and sleeping four restless hours a night at the Econo Lodge, I realized that faint progress, if that, had been made. Streeter conceded that he and his fellow detectives could find no trace of Savannah and were no closer to identifying the killer who’d called himself Crocodile Dundee than they’d been at the outset of their investigation.
In the interim, I’d become a celebrity of sorts. Residents recognized me on the street. They weren’t shy about approaching, offering me encouragement.
“Keep the faith.”
“Don’t stop believing.”
“We’re all praying for you.”
I tried to respond appreciatively, but I felt undeserving of their moral support. Savannah had vanished because of me. I was entitled to no one’s sympathy.
“You doing OK, doll?”
Reeking of tobacco, Ruby, the ancient waitress at Steve’s Coffee Shop, patted my shoulder as she refilled my coffee mug.
“Hanging in there,” I said.
“If you need anything else, you lemme know.”
“Thanks, Ruby.”
I stared down at the half-eaten plate of bacon and eggs sitting on the pine table in front of me. My eyes felt heavy from exhaustion. My shoulders ached down deep. I checked my watch for lack of anything better to do: 0649. Another futile day loomed ahead.
“I know you. You’re that guy.”
I looked up slowly.
Standing beside my table, headed for the register, was a tall man with his breakfast check and a ten dollar bill in his hand. He was wearing a battered straw cowboy hat.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”
“You were looking for your lady. I was just finishing up a sewer cleanout over on Skyview. It was snowing to beat the band.”
“The Roto-Rooter guy.”
He extended his hand and said, “Dwayne.”
“Logan.”
We shook.
“Tell ya what,” he said, “it’s just a cryin’ shame they haven’t found her yet. I know everybody around here is pulling for you, putting out the positive brainwaves. Everybody.”
I thanked him for his concern and he stood there awkwardly with his hat in his hands, shifting his weight from one boot to another, the way people do when they feel the urge to say more but aren’t sure what to say, or how to say it.
“You mind me sitting down for a second?”
I gestured to the other side of the table. He took off his hat and lowered himself into the chair.
“Listen,” he said, leaning forward, closer, “I don’t mean to speak bad of nobody or anything, but if I was the cops, I’d be looking at all these registered sex offenders they got living around here. There’s hundreds of ’em. They’re everywhere. You can get their address on line.”
“Good to know.”
“It’s a real problem, and most people, they don’t even know about it. I got me one living two doors down. They let him out last year. Six little girls he molested and he gets what, three years? If it was me, I would’ve hung his ass.”
I nodded, in no mood to talk.
“Well, anyway,” Dwayne said, “good luck. I hope they find her and the scumbag who took her gets what’s coming to him.”
“Thanks.”
He walked to the cash register where Ruby was happy to take his money.
When I was in the air force, not long out of the academy, a squadron commander who’d earned a Silver Star flying A-1 Skyraiders in Vietnam told me that he could always find enemy ground forces by listening for them from the air. How, I asked him, can you hear the enemy from a Plexiglass-enclosed cockpit, with a big radial engine roaring in front of you and other pilots or air traffic controllers chattering loudly inside your helmet?
“You open your ears,” he said, “close your eyes, and just… listen.”
Years later, on tank-busting missions over Iraq, I did the same thing. I can’t explain why, but the tactic often worked.
Talk to me, Savannah. Where are you? Help me find you.
I closed my eyes and opened my ears, listening for her, hoping to feel her, but all I heard was the metallic scraping of forks and knives on breakfast plates, and the low murmur of conversations, punctuated by occasional laughter among my fellow diners.
My appetite was gone. I gulped a last sip of black coffee, deposited enough cash on the table to cover my meal and cigarette money for Ruby, and left.
Inn keepers Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, accompanied by their panty-sniffing son, Preston, were walking into the restaurant as I exited. We crossed paths without exchanging words. The elder Kavitches kept their eyes to the ground, pretending not to recognize me. But as Johnny held the door for his wife, Preston turned toward me and leered.